A Farewell To Arms

Here's another part of the post-referendum trip through Norfolk.

I hunted down the guard on the train at Great Yarmouth.  "Can you stop at Berney Arms please?"

He squinted at me quizzically.  "Berney Arms?  Are you sure?"

I smiled and nodded.

You don't get many people visiting Berney Arms.  It's famous for it.

The train coasted out of the station, across the flat empty landscape of the Broads.  Wide open spaces of reeds and water.  Swaying grass, browned in the summer sun.  We began to slow on the approach to the station and I went to the door with the guard.  He looked me up and down.  "You going to hang around for the next train?  It's not for a couple of hours."  

"Nah, I'm doing some walking."

"Fair enough."  The train came to a gentle halt and he opened the door.  A wink.  "Last chance to change your mind!"

"I'm alright.  Cheers."  I jumped down to the platform and watched the train disappear to a pinprick.

And suddenly I was alone.

Berney Arms is famous for being irrelevant.  There's a diamond of railway lines between Great Yarmouth and Brundall.  On the northern branch, there's stations at Lingwood and Acle; on the southern branch there's Berney Arms, Reedham, Cantley and Buckenham.  Trains alternate whether they take the northern or southern routes every couple of hours.  But Reedham, Cantley and Buckenham are also on the Lowestoft line, so they get twice as many trains as Berney Arms.

On top of that, Berney Arms is nowhere.  There's no road to the station at all.  There's no village.  You can get there by boat, mooring at the pub that gives the station its name, or you can walk there, but why would you?

The visitor numbers reflect that.  In 2016/17, the year I visited, it hit a high point of passenger numbers at 1126.  Since then they've plummeted, with 42 people visiting in 2019/20, though that was because the line was closed for most of the year.  Since the pandemic I doubt it's had a single visitor; going there is the very definition of non-essential travel.

Sometimes these old platform signs hang on thanks to the efforts of heritage groups.  At Berney Arms it seems to have persisted because nobody remembered to take it down.  There is a faded totem sign as well, for completists:

Now I was isolated and alone, the only human being around.  I trotted towards the river across pitted fields with ruts and puddles.  Cows raised their heads to watch me, bored.  The only landmark was the windmill at Berney Arms which slowly grew and grew as I got closer.

A couple of stiles and I was at the foot of the windmill.  It has been lovingly restored by English Heritage and keeps watch over the confluence of the Yare and the Waveney.  Of course it was closed when I arrived, but it's rarely open; as you'd expect, visitors are hard to come by out here.

Far more important was the pub.  Ian came here in 2012, but he didn't go to the pub; Robert visited the same year, and he did.  But neither of them are professional alcoholics like me - Ian doesn't even drink, meaning he has to deal with the nightmare of daily existence while sober - so I looked forward to casting my expert eye over beer list.

Oh.

Berney Arms wasn't just closed, it was shuttered and abandoned.  The pub garden was overgrown; the concrete full of weeds.  Signs in the window told me that everything of value had been removed from the premises.  It was very much an ex-pub.

This was annoying, and not just because I get tetchy when I'm promised a pint and I don't get one.  I was also thirsty and I had only half a bottle of water in my bag.  And I had about three miles to walk, along empty, unpopulated, paths.  This might get difficult.

The path soon rose upwards away from the empty marina and onto a wide flat embankment built as flood defences.  For the rest of my walk I'd be a raised figure, a single stick floating above the flat Norfolk landscape.  The Broads are a flat, marshy landscape, the remnants of medieval peat workings lost to rising sea levels, and they mix water and land without differentiating.  A path can turn to wet mush; a field slides into a bog.  And always low, a long stretch of green beneath a blue sky.

There was nowhere to hide.  The hot June afternoon sun beat down on my face and body.  The sweat leaked from my skin.  I slipped on a cap to try and stop my vast Tefal Head from turning red.  I drank the remainder of my water bottle, slowly, eking it out, but soon it was gone.  Out here there was no phone signal so I didn't know how far along the path I was.  All I knew was I had to follow this long, snaking river, and eventually, finally, I'd reach Reedham.  

There was the occasional boat, chugging past, its diesel engine providing a thrum to match my walk.  One of them was covered in lads - a stag do perhaps, half a dozen blokes in their twenties with cans in their hand draped across the roof and deck.  Another was far more genteel, piloted by an elderly man in a floppy white hat with his wife sat in the back, looking like Joan Collins at Biarritz.  

I dropped down and sat on the embankment to root around in my bag.  I was absolutely parched.  Surely there was something I could drink?  At the bottom, I discovered a forgotten treat.  Back in Acle I'd bought a meal deal, mainly for the sandwich and the drink, and I'd picked up a pot of chopped fruit as an afterthought.  It was still there.  I chewed on the apple slices and orange segments, making them last, then tipped the juices that had gathered in the bottom of the tub straight into my mouth.  It was delicious.

For a while I sat there, my legs stretched out in front of me, the hairy sticks looking comically thin between my baggy shorts and my chunky walking boots.  Like a Beano character, knobbly knees poking out at right angles.  I let the gentle breeze drift across the landscape, freshened by its touch from the river, cooling me down.  I closed my eyes under the sun until I started to get comfortable.  Then I clambered to my feet and walked on.

Reedham appeared on the horizon, the ordinary, plain world of humans reappearing in my view.  I went down a side road, surprising a couple walking their dog - they clearly didn't expect anyone to arrive from that direction - and headed towards the bridge.  My phone had once again got the barest signal which meant I was able to find The Ship, down by the river.  I ordered a pint of beer and a pint of orange juice and went and sat in the garden outside.  The orange juice was gone before I sat down.

The Ship sits beneath the railway bridge.  It's a swing bridge and still opens three or four times a day - there's a lot of sailing boats on this stretch of the river that are too high to pass underneath.  Plenty of boats were moored up for an afternoon pint, but none that would need the bridge moving.  I watched a pair of dogs play while their owners sipped glasses of wine.  A train passed over the bridge, tooting its horn as it went, and a couple of people in the garden raised their hands in a greeting.  I mulled whether to get another drink and then a later train, but I could feel a stiffness setting into my joints, the familiar sign of my body feeling all that exercise now I'd stopped, so I hauled myself off the bench with a groan and began the walk to the station.

If I were a superstitious man this would be the point where I'd blame the evil spirits for turning on me.  Without warning, out of nowhere, the skies darkened from perfect blue to gunmetal, and a deluge fell on Reedham.  Sudden, heavy, colossal rain, hammering at me, drenching me in seconds.  The drains quickly filled, unused to monsoons, and I was walking in puddles that a few moments ago had been hot bare tarmac.  Worse, Reedham seems to be built on the only hill in the entire county of Norfolk, so I was walking up to the station while water cascaded down and over my feet.  It was bizarre and yet strangely exhilarating.  A turn from perfection to hell in a matter of minutes.

I made it to the station without drowning and hid under the footbridge, listening to the noise of the heavy drops on the metal above my head.  I was drenched but refreshed.  I hoped conditions would be better when I returned in the morning.

Yar's Revenge

One aspect of railway stations that's often overlooked by planners is the sense of arrival.  As the decades have worn on it's become more important to make sure you can park outside, or find a bus stop, or spend your money in a shop.  The idea that this is a welcoming space, this is your hello, your first impression of a new city, has only recently become a consideration.

Some cities get it right.  Walk out of Lime Street and you're smacked in the face by St George's Hall.  King's Cross now has an impeccable pedestrian square out front.  But a lot don't, and this seems to be particularly prevalent in seaside towns, for some reason.  Imagine arriving for your holiday, hot and sweaty from a train journey, carrying suitcases and crying babies, and getting a wonderful welcoming view.  A real inspirational, happy hello, something that makes you glad you've finally arrived.  It seems to happen very rarely.  Southport station is a dark concrete cavern.  Blackpool North empties you into a car park in a bowl.  Morecambe is an apology behind a Morrison's.

I bring this up because Great Yarmouth could be lovely, but it isn't.  The tracks climax in a terminal building at the nose of a promontory where the River Yare meets the River Bure; it's got water on three sides.  Imagine walking off the train and seeing, in the distance, the glitter of sun on water, a view out over the quays.

Great Yarmouth doesn't do this.  It has a large roofed concourse to accommodate holiday crowds but it's dark and unwelcoming.  And the exit is to the side.  You're chucked out into the car park, with the road to the Asda running past, and a high A road towering above as it crosses the river.

I left the station and followed the signs for the pedestrian route into town.  It took me to what could've been an impressive gateway to the town.  The Vauxhall Bridge is a Grade II listed bowstring bridge over the river, built in the 19th century to replace a suspension bridge that collapsed under the weight of pedestrians.  Crowds had gathered on the bridge to watch a circus event, a man being dragged along the river in a bathtub by four geese, and the weight was too much for the chains.  Seventy-nine people died, mainly children, when it fell into the river.  Its replacement is, as you'd expect, incredibly sturdy and powerful.  For years it carried goods trains across to the quayside tramway, where they could be loaded with fish, but now it's merely a pedestrian bridge.  Well, half of it is, anyway.

Ok, walkers and cyclists don't need that entire width of bridge, but it would be nice to see it properly restored.  I walked across and ended up in a car park, then walked down a back road lined with industrial units towards the town centre.  Carpets and tyre shops, then a Job Centre with a queue outside, and I was in the Market Place.

Again, a blunt pragmatism had won out over making it a destination.  What could have been an attractive open space was a car park.  Row after row of parked cars right in the centre of town.  Crossing from one side of the Market Place to the other meant dodging traffic.  This happens across the country, but is usually in small country towns, places where there's not much demand for multi-storey car parks otherwise.  Great Yarmouth is a town of 100,000 people; they have off-street parking spaces.  There's no need for it.

The end of the Market Place looked busy so I took a side street and ended up in the town's bus exchange.  

There are many reasons why buses are seen as the poor relation of public transport.  It's hard to see a noisy diesel bus chugging next to a sleek electric train and not compare it unfavourably.  The role of bus stations really shouldn't be underestimated either.  So many times it's a strip of tarmac under a dark oppressive roof; little natural light, barriers everywhere, nowhere to sit.  Great Yarmouth's exchange was hidden under a pedestrian mall, the dirty secret of the shopping centre, the acknowledgement that yes, people might get the bus there but really they wanted the people in the multi-storey at the far end who'd buy a lot more and load it into the boots of their Volvo.  I passed through the station, past the Wetherspoons at the far end where shirtless men poured more lager into their bellies on the pavement outside, and headed towards the front.  

Regent Road is a long pedestrianised street that stretches from the town centre to the pier.  A generous soul could term it a boulevard, suitable for promenading.  A less generous soul would term it a mess.  It's a stretch of the purest commerce, a naked strip of cash grabs, shops that sell everything and yet nothing you'd want.  It's not souvenirs, a gift from Yarmouth, a stick of rock; it's t-shirts with knock-off band pictures, it's one pound cleaning products and vases, it's Made in China ceramics of animals.  There were vaping superstores, a shop selling "ENGLISH" belts made of "QUALITY" leather where they clearly didn't understand the implications of those inverted commas, a joke shop where a plastic old man bent over to vomit a stream of coloured water into an oil barrel.  There was food, Chinese all-you-can eats and Britannia Fish and Chips and the oily stench of fried chicken.  Amongst all this Le Continental looked positively classy, trying to bring Parisian elegance to a fly tip of debris.

There was litter and noise and the occasional whiff of weed.  Pushchairs clattered through the crowds as battering rams.  Towards the end you finally got the seaside, the sticks of rock and the ice creams, the buckets and spades and nets for crab catching, but it was a long ugly fight to get there.  On the prom they'd tried to make it classier, with granite setts and posh benches, but the ugly face of Jim Davidson (The People's Comedian) leered down at you from the ads for the Pier Theatre, beside Psychic Sally and Showaddywaddy.  

A pier though.  Everyone loves a pier.  I walked out over the sands, resisting the urge to chuck a handful of coppers into the penny falls, seeing the families on the rides.  They were from a different era.  Long John Silver and cowboys and Indians and Frankenstein's monster on the Ghost Train, the plastic fading in the sun.  The dodgems were closed.  I went to the bar where a tiny Eastern European girl served me - after the Brexit vote that morning, I felt like apologising to her and saying I was Remain - and then I took it out and sat overlooking the sand.  Though the prom was busy hardly anyone was on the beach.  A few scattered families, some pensioners, a fisherman at the edge of the water.  

Beer makes everything better.  I headed back to the sea front and walked along it on the beach side.  It was just after lunch and hot and blue.  I sweated into my t-shirt.  The prom was a long strip of old buildings with new plasticky fronts grafted onto the ground floor.  Look above the shiny neon and the strip of signage and you saw a Victorian theatre or pleasure garden tucked away.  Someone had gone to Vegas at some point and drawn inspiration from there, because the arcades had names like The Mint and The Sands - the old Vegas of Dino and Bugsy, before it became a gambling theme park.  The Empire theatre was quietly collapsing and its arched entrance provided shelter for the sleeping bags and cardboard boxes of the town's homeless.

I'm being harsh about Great Yarmouth and it's true that I didn't enjoy it.  It wasn't snobbishness, though - not all of it, anyway.  It was the feeling that the town had sold its soul a long time ago.

Walking around I felt like Yarmouth didn't know what kind of place it wanted to be.  I'd guess that up until the Sixties it had a swaggering arrogance about it, a like it or lump it presentation while the tourists continued to swarm in.  And then package tours came along and they deserted the town and they didn't know how to react.  It felt like now Great Yarmouth was chucking everything at people in a desperate hope that they'd buy it.  Is it good?  Is it well-done?  Those aren't important questions; what's important is, does it make any money?  It was a velvet trap, but the velvet had long been stripped out and all that was left was the sharp metal teeth.  

People were enjoying it.  You can't argue with that.  There were happy faces and smiles and laughs everywhere.  I bet there are people who return here over and over, who love it so much, who dream of their week by the sea.  Good for them.  I wish they had better, that's all.  That they were visiting a place that cared about them and saw them as more than pound coins to be dropped into their banks.  

I walked for a while longer, past the rusting hulk of a Winter Garden that nobody seemed to know what to do with, past a plaque commemorating the hotel where Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield.  A stretch of the prom had been co-opted as a celebration of "Armed Forces Day"; soldiers performing basic maneuvers as a backdrop to the recruitment tents.  Finally I turned back and headed towards the station.

I took the back streets this time rather than walking through town.  I thought about the only other time I'd been to Great Yarmouth, nearly twenty years before, on the boating holiday from hell.  We'd arrived late in the evening, having only just made it across Breydon Water before the tide turned, and tensions were running high.  We went to the town's sole gay bar to try and relax and were delighted to find there was a pub quiz going on.

Reader, we won the quiz.  I don't know if you've ever turned up in a strange pub and handily beaten the regulars but it doesn't endear you to the locals.  We won a load of free booze and endured the resentful stares of the patrons as we went to collect it.  As a result, the pints were drunk a little faster than they should've been; we all ended up way too drunk and noisy and the tensions began to burst.

I only learned about the worst of it the next morning.  I was 20 and still not brilliant at holding my booze.  I fell asleep in our cabin while the three other passengers - I'll call them Rod, James and Freddy, to preserve their blushes - exploded at one another and the BF tried to keep the peace.  They crashed onto the quay and screamed at one another.  Yarmouth was bad, but that night, we didn't cover ourselves with glory either.  Yarmouth resented us with good cause.  We slipped out of our mooring the next morning as early as possible.

Soon I was crossing the river again, this time on the road bridge, and the station was in sight.  I was happy to see it.  I headed for the train, confident that I would never be back.

The Day After

Here's another story of train collecting from 2016.  Content warning: contains bitterness.

It was a terrible night, full of thunderstorms and astonishingly heavy rain.  It crashed off the walls of the hotel and poured down into the car park at its centre, turning it into a pond within minutes.  I was in a Travelodge on the edge of Norwich city centre and the weather had interfered with the TV signal.  The only channel I'd been able to get with any clarity was Mustard TV, Norwich's ultra-local television channel.  Luckily I'd brought a book.  

I was on a high.  Firstly, I was in a different city, and that's always exciting.  Secondly, I had a couple of days of railway station collecting ahead of me, immediately followed by a week's boating holiday on the Norfolk Broads with the BF.  And thirdly, as I'd crossed the road outside the station to head for the hotel, a man had looked at my M.Y. Disco Volante t-shirt (as seen in Thunderball) and exclaimed "James Bond!".  "Yes!" I replied excitedly, and gave him a thumbs up, a deeply uncharacteristic move that I only break out in times of extreme joy.  Things were going well.

Then I woke up.

It was the morning after the Brexit referendum, and I was discovering that 52% of the country had voted Leave.  I sat on the edge of the bed watching BBC Breakfast and trying to cope with my churning stomach and rapidly crashing mood.  It was horrible, horrible news, and I felt sick and confused and angry.  Things were going to get so much worse, and the gurning face of Nigel Farage at that time of the morning didn't help.

I was here in Norwich to collect the Wherry Lines, the railway that threads through the Norfolk Broads out to Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft.  It's a network of tiny country stations tucked in amongst fields and waterways and it seemed interesting and different to my usual tramp around the back streets of inner cities.  I headed to Norwich's central station, a wonderfully grand and ornate building that's more European than British.  It's the curved roof, the red brick; it could fit in a small European city.

Inside, I'll be honest, it's a little disappointing.  The passenger part of the station is entirely within that central tower, and there's no grand glass roof to take your breath away.  You go from capital to provincial as you walk through the doors.

The train was clunky and old-fashioned and I squeezed into a low seat.  I already felt tired and it was barely 8:30.  I wanted to be at home, lying in bed and feeling sorry for myself.  We pulled away from Norwich, passing through suburbs and over rivers, until I dragged myself off at Brundall.

Immediately it was clear that I was in a different world.  There were boatyards and marine engineers around the station.  Trees and bushes pushed their way into every view.  There was peace.  Something had changed on that train journey, a calm had descended.  I felt a little of the stress fall away from my back.

The walk from the station to the village itself was a dark green corridor.  Heavy foliage cast shadows over the road and the path.  I caught glimpses of large houses tucked away behind the greenery.  Then I was in the village itself, a main road with low homes strung along it, a place of retirement money and subtle wealth.  There were thatched cottages and shops here and there, but mostly it was quiet, confident, middle-class affluence.  

A board outside the newsagents' shouted the Eastern Daily Press's headline: NORWICH IN BUT ANGLIA IS OUT.  Even here in peaceful Norfolk the referendum had gone city vs town, the countryside voters carrying the Leave vote.  As I passed the villagers I wondered how they voted, looking askance at them, narrowing my eyes especially at the older people who, it seemed, had voted in far greater numbers for Brexit.  

Brundall Gardens had once been a major tourist attraction.  Originally a private collection, it was a mass of formal gardens filled with rare plants, plus collections of rare birds and animals.  After the First World War it was purchased by a cinema magnate, Frederick Holmes-Cooper, who made it even more of a draw.  He built a hotel and tearooms, a huge house for him and his family, and ran steamship trips from Norwich out to the specially constructed landing stage.  Naturally, the railways wanted to get in on this tourist money, and Brundall Gardens station was opened in 1924, a whole eighty years after its similarly-named neighbour.

As it turned out, that was as popular as the gardens would ever get.  The doors closed fifteen years later and the land was sold off for housing.  The hall burned down in 1969, while the hotel was struck by lightning in 1993 and destroyed.  

And yet the station remains, because it's incredibly difficult to close a railway station, meaning that this little village of 4000 people has a halt at either end.  The storms of the night before had scrubbed the slate clean and left bright blue skies, but outside the station there was still a huge puddle.  Actually it was more like a small flood.  I picked my way through it to the quiet platform beyond.  It said a lot about the station's importance to the network that the help point was still labelled with One, a railway brand that had disappeared in 2008.

I wiped the water off the bench and took a seat.  Brundall had been even smaller than I'd anticipated, and with only one train an hour, I had a bit of a wait.  It was ok.  I sat in the warming Friday sunshine and let myself relax.

Beyond Brundall the line split and I was taking the northern route, on to Lingwood.  It had a proper station building with red bricks and a wooden canopy shielding the platform.  This station was cared for, and a small notice on the board begged for assistance in keeping it that way.  "As you can see our station has come second, yet again! In 1992, almost 25 years ago, our lovely station won the top award as the best kept small station nationally... I would love our pretty little station to win again... but I need some help!  If you would like to give me a hand, in particular restoring the flower beds towards the crossing, please call at the Station House and have a chat."

Sadly I've not been able to find if Lingwood ever did win the award again.  I hope so.  Dedication should be rewarded.

Station Road was a long, straight cut through the village, with a level crossing as it passed over the railway lines.  I followed it past a series of ordinary plain houses, a pub flying England flags, the odd dog walker, until I was leaving the village behind and taking a winding road through farmland.  The verge was littered with homemade signs - one for a farm shop (POTATOES-EGGS-HONEY), which was expected.  The finger post labelled Wedding in a fancy script, less so.  And the series of signs plugging Zumba Gold (the gentler Zumba with all the fun) didn't exactly smack of rural beauty.

I heard the road before I saw it.  The A47, the road from Norwich to Great Yarmouth, a dual carriageway slicing across the mound of East Anglia.  I reached the junction where the quiet country road met it and realised that there were no pedestrian facilities at all.  I wasn't expecting a pelican crossing, don't get me wrong, but there was no way for me to cross safely.  Four lanes of road, plus a central reservation, and not a hint of pavement.  Cars burned by at sixty miles an hour.  I was going to have to make a dash for it.  

I made it to the spit of land between the carriageways and waited for a gap.  And waited.  And waited.  Finally there was enough of a pause for me to make it to the far verge and I began my trudge, simmering with anger at Norwich County Council and their lack of provision for walkers.  I felt the whip of vehicles as they burned by, the tug on my clothes as a truck barrelled along, the smell as more carbon dioxide was belched into my face.  There was plenty of room, fellas, maybe stick in a tiny bit of paving?

It was almost a relief to step into a layby at the side of the road, with another huge puddle and a snack bar belching out the scent of fried onion.  Beyond there was a tiny strip of raised concrete, meaning that I actually had somewhere to walk now, and I followed it until a side gate caught my attention.

There was a patch of green, and a footpath and a dog waste bin.  I was just about to read the informative noticeboard when something caught the corner of my eye.  Down in the undergrowth there was a tiny, hopping rabbit.

I was delighted.  I'd had a pet rabbit as a teenager, Fiver, named after the psychic from Watership Down, and this one looked like a smaller version of him.  I crouched down for a closer look and, wonderfully, he didn't run away.  Instead he hopped closer.  I couldn't believe my luck.  Then I saw why.  One of his eyes was a sickly, dark red, damaged and probably blind.  He probably couldn't see me.

That was it.  That was the final straw.  The miserable, stressful, dark mood that had swilled around me all morning was broken by this tiny lame animal and I burst into tears.  I dropped to the floor and cried for what seemed an age.  I just couldn't any more.

By the time I stopped the rabbit had gone; it might have been blind but it could definitely hear the wheezing screeches of a madman.  I dragged myself up and walked on into Acle, a bit hollow, a bit shocked.

I'd been here before, many years ago.  The BF has been holidaying on the Broads for decades because he loves boats and a few months after we first met he invited me to join him and a few of his friends on a week's holiday.  I was nervous, as I barely knew them, but he assured me they were all great lads and it'd be tremendous fun.

There were five of us on the boat but the interplay of complex human relations and tensions were enough for a thousand people.  It was a fraught, difficult week, as a bunch of explosive people crammed inside a tiny fibreglass boat and drank too much and spat thinly-veiled insults at one another.  There were recent exes, unrequited lusts, sexual frustrations, pure jealousy - all the deadly sins except murder, and that didn't seem far off.  I, being an outsider, was largely exempt from it all, but there were still incidents of frustration that are mentioned even today - it was on this holiday that I discovered the BF's Cluedo technique, which is a technique which I maintain is cheating, and which is why we still can't play Cluedo together 24 years later.

That holiday had started at Acle boatyard so an involuntary shudder went through me as I entered the village.  I'd never been into it properly though, and I found a pretty village green surrounded by shops and pubs.  It was sadly too early for a pint - by which I mean the pubs were closed, not that I didn't fancy one - so I sat on the bench at the centre and had a drink, getting funny looks from the locals as they tried to work out what I was up to.  I headed back out towards the station, pausing only at a tiny supermarket for a sandwich and a pack of fruit and a drink; only when I was hundreds of metres away did I realise I'd not been given a meal deal discount, which rankled with me for at least the next hour.

Acle station was another that was impossibly scenic, with tin "heritage" adverts on the side of the building and a couple of plaques commemorating its Best Kept Station awards.  While I waited, two men walked up and onto the footbridge and stood there, unmoving.  I couldn't work out what they were doing, and started to wonder if they were going to jump, when a slow freight train chugged through the station and they both excitedly retrieved cameras.  Train nerds.  They get everywhere.